Cecilia Conrad

Managing Director, MacArthur Fellows Program

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Cecilia Conrad leads the MacArthur Fellows Program, the MacArthur Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions, and 100&Change, the Foundation’s competition for a single $100 million grant to help solve a critical problem of our time.

Before joining the foundation in January 2013, she had a distinguished career as both a professor and an administrator at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. She joined the economics faculty at Pomona College in 1995. She served as Associate Dean of the College (2004-2007), as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College (2009-2012), and as Acting President (Fall 2012). From 2007-2009, she was interim Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Scripps College.

As Associate Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Pomona, Vice President for Academic Affairs at Pomona, Conrad championed the College's summer undergraduate research program and expanded it to the arts and humanities, led conversations regarding the value and assessment of a liberal arts college education, nurtured collaborations between the arts and the sciences, and worked with academic departments to improve the campus climate for diversity.

As a member of the faculty, Conrad contributed to the curriculum of several interdisciplinary programs and, in 2002, was recognized as California's Carnegie Professor of the Year, a prestigious national award that recognizes faculty members for their achievement as undergraduate professors. Conrad's academic research focuses on the effects of race and gender on economic status. Her work has appeared in both academic journals and nonacademic publications including The American Prospect and Black Enterprise.

Before joining the faculty at Pomona College, Conrad served on the faculties of Barnard College and Duke University. She was also an economist at the Federal Trade Commission and a visiting scholar at The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Conrad serves on the Board of Trustees of Muhlenberg College and Bryn Mawr College.

Conrad was the director of the American Economic Association's (AEA's) Committee on the Status Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP)'s mentoring program. Graduate students who participated in the program during Conrad's tenure as director (1998-2005), are now on the faculty of Pomona College, Harvard, Yale, Ohio State, Cornell, University of North Carolina, and Howard and on the staffs of the Mathematica Policy Institute, the Urban League, and several government agencies. She is a past president of the National Economic Association and of the International Association for Feminist Economics.

Dr. Conrad received her B.A. degree from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.